Meet Our Vendor: Panco Foods – Pan’s Mushroom Jerky

Like many people, I love to travel. While it’s great to see landmarks around the country and world, my favorite thing is learning about different people, cultures, and the food that they make!

Tell us about your culinary journey.

My family are vegetarian buddhists from Malaysia. They used mushrooms and their own original recipe to create a snack that that not only tasted great, but had a texture they desired. Our recipe has now been updated with some new local ingredients and is now manufactured in the PNW.

Where is your favorite place to eat?

Anything with noodles in it… I’m going to cheat and say two places that are in Boston. Gene’s Flatbread Cafe serves hand pulled noodles that are delicious. And Mary Chung’s in Cambridge has these amazing Suan La Chow Show dumplings and Dan Dan noodles.

Where do you source your ingredients?

Some of our ingredients are sourced in the US. But we also have suppliers from around the world. For example, our organic coconut sugar is sourced in Bali and our shiitake mushrooms come from Asia.

Tell us about a new product you are working on.

We’re working on new flavors of our Mushroom Jerky!

What will our fans find at your booth this fall?

Samples of our family’s Mushroom Jerky and bags to buy and take home!

What are your goals for your business in the next year?

Create at least two new flavors of Mushroom Jerky and have great partnerships with retailers around the country so that our product is easy to buy everywhere.

What was your biggest challenge when starting out?

We’re a small family business so time and money! But we’re excited about the traction we’ve made so far and about the team that we are starting to build to help us grow.

What’s your favorite part of this food movement?

There are so many great foods out there that you may not know about. We plan to provide more foods that excite your curiosity and most of all excite your taste buds.

What’s the best part of your job?

Connecting with other entrepreneurs and food startups! No matter the size, I have so much respect for all them. I love exchanging knowledge and stories about what we’ve been through.